Help A Bitch Out - SOLVED!

HaBO: Bride Already Knows Groom Won’t Show Up

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This HaBO request is from Susan, who wants to find this historical romance:

I’m looking for a historical romance I read in the last four years. I’m guessing it was written in the early 2000’s. The book begins with the heroine at the church waiting to get married. The groom doesn’t show. The twist is the bride knows the groom won’t show up. Because he’s run off to Scotland or someplace with his true love and the bride knows all about it because they planned it. They didn’t want to get married and I think they were close friends and she knew he loved someone else who was unsuitable. So she was buying him time to run off. The brother or cousin of the runaway groom (I think he’s a Marquess?) who is the head of the family steps up and agrees to marry the jilted bride. Of course he’s very handsome and mysterious. This did not factor into the plan. They marry because what other choice does she have? She has to pretend that she’s devastated by the events even though she and the runaway groom planned the whole thing. I think the Marquess is impressed with how well she’s handled the wedding debacle. Little does he know it was all planned for her to be jilted at the altar.

I can’t remember the rest of it although the facts of the planned jilting and elopement come out at some point. I think this was the first in a series involving a family. The subsequent books all have a different member of this family. I really liked it and want to reread plus continue the series.

This sounds so familiar, like it was a book I featured on sale and remember reading the book description while entering in the data.

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  1. Ellie says:

    His Bride for the Taking by Tessa Dare hits a lot of these boxes. It’s a novella in Rogues Rush In (other story by Christi Caldwell). The hero was friends with the jilted bride’s dead brother and steps in to save her from scandal when she’s abandoned at the altar. But the jilting was planned, he finds out later, etc.

  2. Joanna says:

    Reminds me of The Seduction of an English Scoundrel by Jillian Hunter.

  3. HeatherT says:

    Seconding His Bride for the Taking — I read it a while ago but it sure sounds like the HaBO book.

  4. Rhiannon says:

    I also came here to mention the Tessa Dare book, which I really enjoyed and have reread, knowing that it didn’t match this. I thought that the groom in that one was told not to show (not that he was running elsewhere) because she instead wanted to marry her brother’s friend. I’d like to know which book answers the request.

  5. LJO says:

    I also thought it might be the TD book. Following.

  6. Saby says:

    I read the HABO thinking “oh surely I have read this, it sounds so familiar” but actually now I’m not sure!! “Last-minute groom substitution” is apparently a more common trope than I realized. (Although I’ve only seen one “last-minute bride substitution” that I can remember, in About a Rogue by Caroline Linden)

    As some others have suggested, His Bride for the Taking by Tessa Dare fits some of the details. I also thought of The Seduction of Elliott McBride by Jennifer Ashley – it has the Scottish setting, but I don’t think the jilting was planned.

    But on the balance I second Joanna’s suggestion, The Seduction of an English Scoundrel. It fits most (if not all) of the details mentioned here!

  7. Karen McC says:

    That storyline matches Jillian Hunters first Bocastle Family book perfectly! Love the whole series.

  8. Susan says:

    SOLVED!! It is The Seduction of an English Scoundrel by Jillian Hunter. I got a little detail wrong. The H courts the jilted bride to rehab her reputation. I realize I’ve read a couple of Boscastle Family books.
    THANKS!!

  9. Laurel says:

    Another last minute bride substitution is A Marriage of Inconvenience by Janet Louise Roberts, where a bluestocking sister takes the place of her flighty sister who is eloping with another man. It has a taming of the shrew vibe, as the hero hates bookish females and turns her into fashion plate so he won’t be embarrassed by her. Shows its age (it was published in 1972), but still a sweet Regency romance.

  10. Karin says:

    There are last minute bride substitutions in “How To Deceive a Duke” by Lecia Cornwall, and “The Unexpected Bride” by Elizabeth Rolls. In both cases, the substitute is the sister of the original bride. I’m sure I’ve read more but these 2 come to mind.

  11. Rhiannon says:

    There’s also a Julia Quinn novella/short story titled A Tale of Two Sisters in the where’s my hero anthology (with the Lisa Kleypas D.Craven’s daughter’s story). Hero is questioning his choice a few days before the wedding (and his bride is preparing to elope with another), there’s a substitution (again the sister as Karin mentioned with the other cases.)

  12. Andrea says:

    I took screen shots of the contents so I can add a bunch of new books to my “to read” this website seems dangerous!!

  13. I was going to suggest the Tessa Dare novella, but now that I’ve read the comments, I’m adding several of these titles to my TBR. (Incidentally, I very much liked Caroline Linden’s About a Rogue.)

  14. Sandra says:

    Not a bride substitution per se, since marriage was never Vidal’s intent, but Devil’s Cub fits the bill.

  15. Marfisa says:

    Another quasi-bride substitution story is the manga series “Takane and Hana,” in which the couple are (or at least start out as) arranged-marriage interview partners, rather than bride and groom. Hana is a cheerful, levelheaded high school girl whose office worker dad finds himself in a jam when the CEO of the company happens to meet Hana’s pretty, flighty older sister and decides that she’d be a good arranged-marriage bride for his twentysomething grandson (and probable successor) Takane. (Apparently arranged marriages, or at least interviews set up by professional matchmakers in the hope that they’ll lead to marriage, still happen sometimes in Japan, especially among more upper-class people. At least, if what happens in manga bears any resemblance to reality. Which admittedly is a pretty big if.)

    Unfortunately, big sister already has a flashy boyfriend she’s currently head over heels for, so she refuses to go to the arranged-marriage interview. Dad is terrified of getting fired if he has to tell the CEO that his daughter not only won’t cooperate, but is so rude she won’t even show up. So he talks Hana into impersonating her sister and going in her place, with the fact that she’s a young-looking sixteen at most being disguised by a traditional kimono and wig (this is apparently considered reasonably normal female attire for this kind of formal matchmaking occasion), plus lots of makeup to cover her freckles and make her look more grown up. Since one reason the CEO came up with this whole plan in the first place is that Takane is notoriously picky when it comes to women, Hana’s parents hope that if she just acts polite but boring at the meeting, Takane will turn down this marriage prospect of his own accord the same way he’s done with others in the past.

    Unfortunately, Takane, despite being handsome, charismatic, and intelligent, is not only picky, but so arrogant and full of himself that after a few minutes of stilted chitchat at the matchmaking meeting, he complains that “big sister” doesn’t look as glamorous as his grandfather had claimed. (Luckily the CEO, who would probably have realized that the shorter, more ordinary-looking Hana wasn’t her sister in spite of the kimono, wig, and makeup, didn’t actually come with him.) Then Takane starts making snide cracks about women who slather on too much makeup in an effort to catch a man. It doesn’t take long for Hana to get so fed up with this that she jumps up and flings her wig in his face, yelling that in fact she had no interest in being paired up with him in the first place, then storms out of the room.

    Takane gets nagged into following her by the pro matchmaker, who was pretty appalled by his behavior, not just Hana’s. When he catches up with Hana in the garden outside (the matchmaking meeting took place at a fancy hotel), she’s still so annoyed that she blurts out the whole story about impersonating the sister who refused to show up. Takane finds this amusing enough that he agrees not to tell his grandfather the CEO about the switch in prospective marriage partners, or anything else that might have a disastrous impact on her father’s continued employment. He then smoothes things over with the pro matchmaker so she won’t spill the beans about Hana’s outburst either.

    Hana goes home with her parents, assuming that that’s the end of it. But it turns out that Takane is intrigued by the fact that Hana is practically the first woman he’s ever met who not only failed to fall all over him, but expressed active disinterest in having anything to do with him romantically. So he starts showing up at her school in his limo and presenting her with ridiculous gifts like gold statues so heavy she can barely lift them.

    The more Hana ridicules Takane’s ridiculously out-of-touch-with-everyday-reality idea of courtship (or life among the non-elite), the more interested he gets. Hana, in turn, gets a kick out of making fun of Takane’s latest ludicrous gifts and pronouncements, and is endlessly entertained by his bemused “what strange planet is this?” reactions to “commoner” experiences like going to amusement parks or her friend’s family’s ramen restaurant.

    It may not sound like it from this description, but it soon becomes clear that beneath all the mutual sniping, Takane and Hana actually do like each other and have a sense of humor about their many differences, however exasperated by them they may be in the heat of the moment. (Well, Hana does. It takes Takane a while to realize that one of the reasons he likes Hana is precisely because she’s not afraid to puncture his pretensions, not in spite of this.) So it’s more like a more class-conscious, less “I hated your guts until my friends convinced me you were secretly in love with me” Japanese update of Shakespeare’s Beatrice and Benedick than it is like those stories where the couple bickers so bitterly and incessantly that they seem to genuinely detest each other to the point where you wish they would just bite the bullet and split up.

  16. Karin says:

    @Marfisa, that sounds like an awfully cute story.

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